Tag Archives: libraries

Faculty expressed anxiety about not having time to develop curriculum to “maximize effectiveness of the (active learning) room” because the tenure system doesn’t leave space for that, or reward it much if at all.

I had the pleasure of presenting at the National Forum for Active Learning Classrooms (NFALC) on Thursday August 7th, along with my UNC Charlotte colleagues Kurt Richter and Rich Preville (our slide deck is here). We were talking about our experiences in designing, building, programming, and evaluating our Active Learning Classrooms at UNCC. And in particular we were pointing to the importance of the Active Learning Academy, the community of practice model we have arrived at to make it more likely that these classrooms will be successful additions to the ways we approach teaching and learning spaces.

We are just starting to put together and think about the information we’ve been collecting this past academic year on the student and faculty practices that occurred in those classrooms. I’ve been working, with the help of graduate research assistants, on directing observations in a variety of classes, interviewing faculty on their expectations and experiences, and trying to get a sense of how best to influence the development and configuration of learning spaces (not just classrooms) elsewhere on campus.

I have been witnessing, in the last several months a flurry of intensifying discussions around learning spaces, and in particular how to approach planning for them. We who work in Atkins Library are discussing how to reconfigure our 1st and 2nd floors, and also revisiting our ground floor spaces to see what we can improve. Jisc has launched a quick guide. I have been asked to think about giving talks at 3 or 4 different venues by now around teaching and learning and spaces.

What I’d like to point out here is that, based on my experiences dealing with learning spaces in libraries and classrooms, buildings are the least interesting part of the space conversation. Yes they are necessary prerequisites. But before they are built, or reconfigured, I would like people to ask:

what is the activity you want to support?

how does that activity fit into the larger work of the university?

what are the current learning spaces at the university? Do they relate to each other? Can they accommodate some of what you want to happen? Why or why not?

What are the new spaces going to look like in relation to the spaces that are already there?

I see the 3rd and 4th points getting lost in the shuffle a great deal, and it’s frustrating and unnecessarily limiting. The learning spaces an institution plans will inevitably be in a network of other spaces. Being not just aware of those connections, but actually leveraging that awareness, making the spaces explicitly connected to one another, raising the visibility of the spaces to teachers and learners alike, can have an impact. If the activity they want to engage in (group work, for instance) is supported more effectively by a particular kind of space, institutions should not just provide that space but make sure that people are aware it exists. So what does that look like? Digital maps? Tours? Faculty telling students about where they can work? Teaching happening in as many different spaces as possible, to demonstrate what is possible across the university? What else?

Also: People occupy spaces not just because they exist but because they have motivations to occupy. There is no “build it and they will come.” If the space is built and there’s no motivation to engage, they will never show up. Kitted out classrooms that ignore motivation become just another kind of useless edtech

Another thing I am struck by, and the note we ended our NFALC presentation on last week, was that the least innovative thing about UNC Charlotte’s active learning classrooms are the active learning classrooms. The SCALE-UP model has been around for 25 years, the research has been done about the efficacy of active learning techniques and environments. The rooms themselves are not innovative.

BUT. Innovation can come out of these rooms (and is!). And that innovation does require a baseline physical setup (which costs money, and involves technology), but to really happen it requires money spent on professional development time for faculty, and in particular on providing time and space to rethink pedagogy. That is, the building of these spaces can only be the beginning. Institutions need to commit to providing institutional space (time, resources, money, prestige) to prioritize teaching and learning. This is why we want to talk less about the technical specifics of the rooms (although we can, certainly, discuss that) and more about the Active Learning Academy, the faculty and staff who trade practices, teach each other, learn from their students, go further with what works, and discard what does not. We see, in this Academy, experienced faculty stretching themselves because the presence of these rooms frees them from having to jerry-rig active learning practices into spaces such as traditional lecture halls. Once they do not have to fight the physical space they are in, they can really start to play with what is possible.

I’d like to emphasize: you can’t have spaces that generate innovative practices without surrounding them with effective staffing and programming. Building the spaces is the beginning (or should be) of an iterative process whereby the spaces are programmed, occupied, evaluated, and reprogrammed as necessary.

Who owns the thinking around holistic development of learning spaces at universities? No consistent set of people. And teaching staff don’t necessarily have the time or resources to lead that thinking. There needs to be a dedicated well-compensated team whose work it is to think carefully about learning spaces all the time.

So when thinking about space planning for teaching and learning, there should also be people-planning. Because these spaces without people, without programming, without communities of practice making them living breathing growing parts of the university’s mission, become accessories, mere performances of teaching, and learning opportunities lost.

I have just completed a week away that contained two different Visitors and Residents workshops. The first I conducted with Dave White at Parsons, the New School for Design, at the invitation of Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, with a group of Parsons faculty. The second was a two-day event at the invitation of Keith Webster at Carnegie Mellon, with a group that included librarians and library staff from CMU as well as the University of Pittsburgh, and Dave and I were joined by Lynn Connaway to run the workshop. Dave blogged his views on the different workshops here.

When we have people map themselves, the range of practice remains striking. We get “sparse” maps

and we get “filled in” maps.

We get people whose Resident practice is largely in their personal lives,

and others who primarily engage in the Resident spaces of the web (such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google+) because of what they need to do in their professional lives, or for their volunteering obligations, or as a part of their artistic practice.

The point we have to make over and over again at these events is that no mode of practice is inherently better than the other. I can see the tension run out of people when we tell them that no one is going to be judged for their maps. The intent of our work, and the workshop, is not to identify those who are “More Resident” so as to claim that their practices are Best and then send their largely Visitor-centric colleagues over to Learn How To Do the Web Better.

Because the V&R workshop is not about Doing the Web Better. The workshop is a way of visualizing practice, and in particular about making clear all the different ways in which the Web is a Place, a location for people to meet and interact and learn and leave and come back to. A place where, as with any place that has people in it, individuals can do the social work that results in relationships, where intimacy can flourish even in the absence of face to face interaction.

Engaging with digital places is not a substitute for engagement face to face, rather it proliferates the possible locations where connections can be made.

In libraries, in higher education generally, the work of institutions is embedded in relationships. Students, faculty, and staff rely on each other (or don’t) because of webs of trust and credibility that are not just about institutional authority ( they are seldom just about that) but because of the meaningful connection that grow when people interact with each other in common places like: Student Unions, Library Buildings, Cafes, Classrooms. But also: Twitter, Facebook, YikYak (!) and Instagram. The Digital can be (among other things) a tool, or a resource full of content, but its existence as a Place is what can be hard to see, at the same time it is so terrifically important to grasp.

We seldom have time to be reflective about our own practices, what they are as well as what they mean. In offering the workshop format as an open resource, and also in coming in to run the workshops ourselves, as we did this last week at Parsons and at CMU/Pitt, the Visitors and Residents team is helping provide space for such reflection to take place. Further thoughts from Lawrie Phipps about where we can take the V&R framework from here can be found here.

Well I am back in Charlotte, after nearly a month away from home, and am realizing that I can divide my time in March chronologically, spatially, or in terms of genre. I think I’ll try the last one, as it occurs to me that I really did to several different kinds of things in my travels this past month.

So I’ll post briefly (or, uh, not so briefly) here about the workshops I got to facilitate, not in the least because I want to have a centralized place to collect the links to all of the blogposts other people have written considering the content of those workshops. If I’ve missed any, please let me know! I will edit.

Catherine blogged about it afterwards here . And Sharon Flynn Storifyed it here.

What I’d like to emphasize here is how pleased I am with the steps Dave and I took to make sure that the people attending the workshop (who were so enthusiastic! Thank you!) came away with something concrete (we call it the “So What” part, see the entire workshop template in the .pdf here). We not only discussed the V&R concept, but consistently connected it with practice. People were encouraged to reflect on their own practices, recognize the differences in the practices of their colleagues, and last but not least, think about (and articulate) ways they wanted to move their own practices going forward. They did this by first mapping what they did on the V&R pole chart.

Then they “toured” the maps of their colleagues, and eventually annotated their own maps with the meaning/content of what they originally mapped, as well as their aspirations for the new or different.

Map from one of our participants. Arrows show direction in which they want to move their practices–FB more Resident, for example.

Some people wanted to engage in new digital platforms. Some wanted to stop engaging in some places so as to have more room to develop elsewhere. Some people saw how much their practices reflected their work, but not their personal lives, and resolved to think more carefully about the time they were spending online in all aspects of their lives.

The power in workshops like these is in providing moments people would not otherwise have to really see, and think about, what they are doing. Too often we engage with digital tools or platforms because they are there, or recommended, or because people are there, but don’t have the space to think about why. When people put a presence into a platform but then never really use it, why should they have that presence at all? Being deliberate about motivations to engage can provide people with important chances to make careful choices about the limited time they have for f2f and digital interactions.

I think one of the best things we did in this workshop was make sure there was someone in the room (in this case it was Sharon Flynn) who could make concrete suggestions to people in the room about where they could go for institutional help in learning more about the things they wanted to change and develop. Too often when we do this workshop at conferences we are reduced to hand-waving and “I hope you can find someone to help you!” Being able to hand participants off to specific next steps was indeed Marvelous.

I think the most important thing I needed to get right at UXLibs was my workshop on ethnographic methods. It was planned and conducted in conjunction with my colleagues Andrew Asher and Georgina Cronin, and the intention was to equip all of the teams (read more about the overall picture of UXLibs here , here and also here. Ned Potter blogged specifically about the ethnography day here) with a range of instruments and approaches to use for their project in the Cambridge libraries. My workshop was on observations, and while I gave them a basic handout about domains, etc., I really wanted them to just pay attention and note what they saw, and then mindfully write it up. Participants worked in pairs (or teams of 3) and had to pool their observations into a coherent narrative at the end. In Cambridge I sent them out to the Market Square, which bustled with people. Some teams went inside to a bookshop, which bustled less, but they all had plenty to write up. Our discussion post write-up was less about what they observed, and more about the process. Without much prompting on my part we got to discuss the observer effect, ethical obligations for researchers working in public spaces, hazards of interpretation, and the limits of observation as a method (i.e., what else do you have to do to get to a better understanding of what is going on?). I was terrifically pleased–after the rush and bustle of observations, the discussion was fairly low-key, but I felt like everyone dug into the issues and came away with the things in their heads they needed for the afternoon’s fieldwork.

My colleague Andrew Preater invited me back to Imperial College to work with library staff members with regard to both ethnographic techniques and V&R mapping. Eleni Zazani blogged (very kindly!) about it both parts of the day here. Most of the participants had done the V&R mapping before, but I had not had a chance to try the “So What” part with them, yet. They really came through, annotating maps and talking with each other and with me about what they wanted to change. It’s such a powerful moment to me, to see when people become clear about what they would like to have happen.

After a short break I had them do a mini-version of the ethnography workshop I conducted at #UXLibs. Karine Larose had been with us in Cambridge, as had Angus Brown in the Imperial leadership team. So Imperial is well-equipped with people to take ethnographic techniques forward into the work of the library.

This time the observations were distributed throughout the library building, and because I wanted them to be able to apply the workshop to the specific Imperial Library context, we did spend time talking about what they saw, and what they thought it might mean. Once again 15 minutes of observations required far more than that of write-up time (let alone time for reflection, analysis, interpretation, and planning of next steps!).

I think I’d like to have a workshop full of library leadership sometime, to have the people who need to make decisions about how staff spend time and resources experience the powerful potential of ethnography, as well as subjectively experience just how much time it takes to do effectively.

Inspired by the concrete suggestions that people had taken away from the V&R workshop in Galway, and the morning at Imperial, I wanted the ethnography piece to have specific outcomes, too. So at the end we collectively thought about the questions that participants wanted to start to try to explore via ethnographic techniques at Imperial.

Kingston University and UNC Charlotte have a formal exchange with each other, and I’m delighted to be starting to participate in conversations there around libraries and learning spaces. Thanks again to Robert Elves for being my liaison and scheduler. The final workshop I conducted was here, and I was once again fortunate to have 2 alums from the UXLibs conference, Sara Burnett and Simon Collins. We didn’t have time to do observations in the library sites this day, but spent good productive time having Sara and Simon go over some of the methods they learned at UXLibs. They also described some of the issues that they observed in the Cambridge libraries, and that led into a great discussion of what they were interested in exploring at Kingston. The outcome of this workshop was a document with a list of questions to start asking, with each question accompanied by the instruments/methods that might provide a good start in finding things out.

Real Outcomes for Real People

Overall, it was just so much fun to not just talk ideas with people, but to take the ideas towards something that everyone agreed would be worthwhile to try. I was never in the position of telling people what they needed to do, but rather helped provide space for the conversation to happen, for people to connect with each other and with new concepts and to make new connections with things they had already heard before. It was satisfying work in a completely different way from report- or article-writing, or presentation-making.

Thanks to all the institutions (NUI Galway, Cambridge, Imperial, Kingston) and people within them who provided me the chance for such work. it was practical in the best sense, and I hope I get to do more of that going forward.

So I’m thinking a great deal about control in libraries, and have been for a while. It is sending me back to the point, late in my graduate career, when Laura Nader’s Controlling Processes essay came out, and when some of my classmates were working with Nader’s paradigms in their own research. Her argument is, in part, that tracing, describing, and analyzing the flow of power within systems is crucial to illuminating the potential to transform cultural ideas. The redistribution of control in the law, in medicine, and in museums was the focus of her 1997 essay, but of course many institutions are fair game, and libraries are no exception.

Libraries are rife with controlling processes–they are cultural institutions infused with very particular senses of what scholarship and studying looks and sounds like, what the proper material environments are for such activities, what resources should be provided by institutions (and what should not be). Rules around noise and quiet, consumption of food and drink, occupancy of space (when is the library closed? Does it close? Who is allowed in? Who is prevented?) are all performances of library institutional control of library spaces. These rules are shot through with power–who determines what is quiet? What is noise? Who makes the decision about who is allowed in the library?

Signs are great evidence of the attempts to control spaces in libraries. “Quiet Zone.” “No Phones.” “No eating or drinking.” “Silent Zone.”

The LSE is trying to address student demand for space with a “ticketing” system.

A lot of the conversations I participate in around configurations of library space involve me, at some point, advocating letting go of control. Is there a noisy space in your library? Why is that? Maybe you don’t need to “fix” that? Maybe just label it as such and move on? Where are there “naturally” quiet areas? Do they need policing to be that way? Maybe they are not so “natural?” Why are you trying to make atriums Quiet Zones? Where do students go who need to talk to each other about their work? Do you want them in your library? Why or why not?

Are you sure about all of that?

This is a big part of my work. Asking annoying questions. But it’s also my job to pay attention to more than my personal theory that less policing in libraries is a good thing.

Because the thing is, that students are also asking the library for controlled spaces. Tomorrow is the Last Day of Classes (#LDOC!) for students this Fall semester at UNC Charlotte. The library is already full of people, and will only get more full. This is the time of year when we get the most requests for protected spaces, reserveable spaces, for quiet spaces. This is the time of year when requests for control are most acute: make them quiet, make these computers available, give me space to think, give me space to talk, make them move so I can do my work, make this print. The student sense that there is so much they don’t have control over spills out into the demands they make of their institutional spaces (I’m willing to bet they have demands for their living spaces this time of year, too, with regard to noise and quiet, access, technology, clutter).

If we think carefully about the nature of controlling processes in the library, what they do and who they are for, we need to remember that one of the defining characteristics of libraries is, in fact, control.

Libraries are constructed in part in contrast to the perception that everything outside of their spaces is uncontrolled. The environment of the library is physical spaces, resources, and the people within the library. Some of these things are easier to control than others. The implications of controlling people are myriad, and not entirely benign. Who is perceived as out of control? Under what circumstances? Is there another interpretation of their behavior? One person’s “out of control” is another person’s “engaged conversation.” These differences need to be navigated, negotiated, explored, not enshrined in rules.

Libraries in popular discussions of public spaces are often described as “oases” (for example, most recently and visibly, but not unproblematically, the public library in Ferguson). Discussions around public libraries are of course infused with the same complicating factors of race, class, privilege, and politics that are present in any discussion of the public sphere, in the US and elsewhere. One person’s “riot” is another person’s “protest.”

Of course non-library spaces are controlled, too. And holding the library up in contrast to “chaos” is often an unnecessarily antagonistic way of framing the rest of reality.

I find myself sympathetic to the desire to find one place in the world where you can feel that things are controlled, if not by yourself, then by someone you trust. Students trust libraries to control their environment, as students frequently feel they themselves cannot.

So while we listen to that desire for control, we need to not abuse that trust, and we need to listen deeply and carefully to what is behind it. We need to trace the requests, listen to who is asking, consider what the mechanisms for effective control might be. There are many models–they do not have to all be top-down. I think about community self-policing. I think about wide and varied student engagement in library spaces so that they are part of the solutions they want to see, not just demanding that someone else execute policies on their behalf.

What does control look like? When is it strictly necessary? When can it be let go? What happens then?

Recently my colleagues Beth Martin and Heather McCullough presented at Educause on our assessment agenda in Atkins Library. I love this work, I am delighted to work with them here at UNC Charlotte. I’m sharing the poster here because I think it’s terrifically important to get as many voices as possible into the conversation about what assessment is, could be, and should be for, in Academic Libraries, and in Higher Education generally. I have blogged about the Mixed-Method, Interdisciplinary library before, and I think that this poster is a nice example of how we are going to operationalize that at Atkins, with partnerships within and outside of the library.

I’m including a summary in this post of their main points, and a link to their poster.

Click to get to .pdf

Educational Analytics and Libraries

Educational Analytics in this context encompasses both Learning Analytics and Academic Analytics.

Learning Analytics focuses on data about the learning process while academic analytics focuses on data about the institution.1

UNC Charlotte Atkins Library is putting together an analytics initiative that will explore both learning and academic analytics through a library lens.

The Initiative

What we do now

What we want to do

How we will move forward

Count items and people

How are patrons using the library?

Discover what data we have using the Data Asset Framework Methodology2

Work across the institution using data to inform policies and practices

Compare to peer and aspirational institutions

The Tools

Measurement Information Services Outcomes (MISO)

National Survey of libraries used to compare across institutions as well as inform internal practices

Integrated Library System

Main library system that stores usage data

Association of Research Libraries data

National library data

UNC Charlotte Institutional Research

Data analysis of all institutional research

Google Analytics

Learning Management System

Data on student usage

Library Database statistics

How are scholarly articles/books being used

Altmetrics

Social and collaborative nature of institutional research

Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS)

Qualitative studies

Space use

Classroom use

Student Learning Outcomes analysis for library instruction

The project is in the first stage of the Data Asset Foundation methodology, which is scheduled to finish this December. Once we have a clear picture of the available data we will look at our initial research questions to determine what we can explore with the available data and what data we may need in the future.

So, I’ve been thinking about mapping, not just because I have these maps I collected at UCL in March, but also because I’ve been thinking more about the utility of processes such as the V&R mapping that we have been using in our research. What Dave White has said to me is that mapping exercises like V&R give us processes to offer people, but no answers, that in fact people use the processes to find their own answers. It’s not our job as researchers to provide answers, in this framing, but to ask effective questions that prompt people to find their own way. As usual, my first instinct was to be annoyed by this. My annoyance stems now from thinking that Dave is probably correct.

I am often asked for Answers when I give talks about what is going on with faculty and students and libraries and education generally. While it’s tempting to try to provide Answers, I think that I’m much better at coming up with more questions. And ultimately, that might be more useful, as I think I’m probably not the one who should be Answering.

Cognitive mapping exercises at UNCC and UCL reveal people’s learning landscapes. Thinking about cognitive mapping in the larger context of mapping exercises made me consider the possibility of a discussion around the cartography of learning, that is, all the different ways we try to capture and visualize what people are doing when they are learning. We are mapping (or having people map for themselves) what they perceive to be there, and in the mapping we receive a revelation, not something predictable, or predicting. We also do not have a precise rendering of actual practices, but an interpretation of practice. How can we use the maps to build more deeply observed pictures of behavior? How do we deal with the fact that maps are only ever representations of a lived reality? “The map is not the territory.”

If the Google Earth of Bloomsbury looks like this:

And the Google Map looks like this:

And the Tube map, itself a concept map of sorts, looks like this:

Then we have a map like this one I collected in March:

For this first year archaeology student, UCL is a series of spaces isolated from each other, but connected by the fact that he needs to do things, different academic tasks, in each space (my favorite is the professor’s office in the lower left, filled with clutter except for a small clearing in which professor and students can sit to talk). I can see that these spaces are connected, but he does not represent them that way.

This PhD student has drawn lines indicating how connected her spaces are, the ones in Bloomsbury, and the ones that are not. She annotated the map with notes about the technology and particulars of the work she does in each space, which places have particular resources (content and people) she cannot get anywhere else, and marks cafes with the cups of tea or coffee that she goes there for. She has glossed her own map–I can bring my own spin to things (and I will), but there is already interpretation here.

Cognitive maps, the V&R maps, these are all contributing to a kind of cartography of practice. In the case of the cognitive maps I’ve been collecting from faculty and students, the mapping is an emic process, where the the practitioners themselves represent their own practices as best they can.

Here we engaged in the mapping of the traces of practices of others as an analytical tool, engaging in an etic process, imposing our interpretation of meaning from the outside looking in.

They map, we map, and possible meanings and definite questions can emerge from the process of mapping.

I have been working my way through Latour’s Reassembling the Social with a Twitter group of colleagues, and am only part way through. Latour invokes the “cartographies of the social” (p.34) when discussing the need for researchers to pay attention to actual practices, to the lay of the networks in play, and to de-emphasize the interpretive leap while still in the process of figuring out what it is we are looking at. I am also struck by Latour’s insistence that the best social science cannot privilege the perspective of the researcher, but must be embedded in the meanings and practices generated by the people being studied. This, to me, is a plea for anthropology, but also for the sort of lack of privileging that mapping exercises like these can inspire–these maps get their meaning from the intentions of the people drawing them as much if not more than from the interpretations we researchers later layer onto them.

Anthropologists are not always fantastic at not-privileging their interpretations of meaning, and I’ve been helped in this regard by the neo-Boasian appeal of Bunzl. I frequently talk about being a sort of “native ethnographer,” as an academic studying academia, but Bunzl’s critique of the necessity of outsider status to anthropology is making me rethink that. Our position as “outside” or “inside” is not as important as paying attention to what is present, and describing it as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible. It is not that interpretation is impossible, but that what we think things mean can and should be informed by a variety of perspectives, including that of the people among whom we are doing our work.

What is important about the maps, and I think about research generally, is the process, the questions and the discussions they inspire, not the end result. Thoughts about meaning should emerge from the discussion, from the process, and should never be framed as The Answer.

Big transitions happening at J. Murrey Atkins Library this summer, with the departure of my current boss Stanley Wilder for his new position as Dean of Libraries at LSU (both of my parents went to LSU, so Geaux Tigers!). When he shared the content of the talk he gave when interviewing at LSU, I encouraged him to let me host it here. And he agreed! So, here is the (slightly edited) talk Stanley gave, laying out his vision for libraries.

What I appreciate about Stanley’s take on the Future of Libraries is that it’s not about specific solutions, but about relationships and processes.

Two paths forward

an edited version of Stanley Wilder’s candidate speech for the

Dean of Libraries position at Louisiana State University

March 30, 2014

Images by Maggie Ngo, UNCC

Here are some things I hear: Everything I need to know is on Google. I’m a faculty member and I don’t use the library. I’m a senior in college and I’ve never been in the library. I’m a senior in college and still use my hometown public library. Hasn’t the Internet made libraries obsolete? I don’t need a library. I don’t read books. Information wants to be free. Librarians are scary people and I don’t trustbookstacks!

Every one of these comments is easily and demonstrably wrong, and at the same time, each one is a gift of the first order. Each one is the gift of attention, an invitation for us to explain who we are and why we’re here. We librarians ask for nothing more.

Oh, we get where these questions come from: In an age of dizzying change in the nature of academic work, and the shifting shape of the discourse that drives it forward, where should the library go from here? As I see it, the library has two paths forward, and I submit this vision as my response to the prompt you’ve given me.

The first path for the research library is its traditional role. A crucial aspect of the nature of learning and research is timeless, absolutely so. In this sense, if you want to know what research library will do in the future, well the answer is that it will do what it has always done.

If you’ll bear with me, I’ve drawn a picture of what I mean.

This is the scholarly record. It is the record of what is known or imagined about the world. Teaching and research consists of assimilatingthe scholarly record as it pertains to the disciplines we study, in such a way as to enable us to synthesize something new. In the case of faculty, this synthesis is the creation of new knowledge or new art that adds to the scholarly record, where the cycle starts over. This picture applies to students as well, wherein the syntheses they produce often take the form of apprenticeships for the work their faculty do.

Assimilation, synthesis, reading, writing. Here is teaching, learning, and research, as an endless, virtuous cycle around the scholarly record.

I worked for a great Dean of Libraries who came up with the beautiful aphorism:

“A library is a place where readers come to write, and writers come to read. “

I say YES to that: the core function of a research library is now and always will be to build the collections that drive this cycle. Of course it’s not enough to simply build collections, the library also has to facilitate how people interact, at both ends. For example, teaching generations of new students how to work with the literatures of their chosen disciplines. But really, all library services can be characterized in this way. They cluster at these transition points, here and here.

And with that, I’m going to stop myself because I promise you, I could go much further with this silly drawing. My point is this: the idea of the library is so embedded in the fundamental nature of learning and research that it makes no sense to ask whether you need one. The real question before us is whether you need a great library.

That, then, is my first path. Everything about it relates to the “what” of academic work, what it is fundamentally, what it intends to do in the world.

But here’s one thing I am sure of, and if you retain nothing else from this presentation, please let it be this: this new environment is going to allow smart research libraries to perform that ancient role in ways that produce spectacular new value. This is the library’s second path: embracing, inventing the future so as to do better what we have always done.

Like what, for example. There are so many opportunities that really, our problem is choosing from among them. I’m going to just call out some, a simple list of examples that… illustrate my point, obviously, but I’ve also taken care to choose examples that I have experience with helping produce.

Every item on this list is now or should be a new part of a research library portfolio. What’s more, each one relates directly to issues that faculty and institutions are wrestling with right now. In many cases, they are wrestling, but not knowing that what their library has to offer. There’s nothing dismissive or condescending about it, they just don’t know.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the biggest threat to research libraries is low expectations. Sometimes they come in thoughtlessly dismissive ways, “Aren’t libraries obsolete?” But just as often, low expectations feel warm and fuzzy, filled with nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. To my ears, both are equally toxic.

So no, our communities can’t be expected to just know enough, say, about the dangerous instability in the scholarly communication marketplace to understand the importance of open access, or any of the other ways we librarians can make things better. No, we have to tellthem, and we have to show them.

I have one more thing that I must say about the list. The work required for each is grounded, in one way or another, in traditional research library values and expertise. At the same time, every one of them is situated in an entirely new context. I feel a real sense of urgency on this point: this list is turf, and it is ours for the taking. But doing so means that as a profession, as a library, we must recognize that producing the transformational outcomes that are possible here also requires newskills that we must either learn for ourselves, or hire into our organizations. This is not a phase, it’s the new normal.

Let’s talk about students. Thelibrary’s student role is large and diverse, as it always has been, but here again we find watershed developments all around us, and once again, the new opportunities that come with.

Half of a research library’s student function is pedagogy. Instruction. The thing we do here is to increase the sophistication of students in interacting with the literatures of their chosen disciplines. Fine, but as you see from the list on the screen, that pedagogy isn’t just situated in terms of discipline, it’s also situated in a broad range of learning environments, which makes it subject to the same seismic change that is shaking teaching throughout higher education.

A quick story to illustrate: Recently, the head of our instruction programming discovered that faculty are very receptive to hearing about ways they can pare back on research paper assignments, in cases where doing so allows them to focus attention on the topic-choosing, question-framing, literature searching, basic-synthesis-forming skills. Library instruction can help with all of that, and this librarian and her staff have created web-based, interactive, and discipline-specific instruction modules that support that use case. And now Stephanie Otis has a fine trade in advising faculty with their course design.

That’s a small but significant example of what I mean by proper positioning of the library on campus. Stephanie puts us exactly where we want to be.

The title I’ve used for this section is “the world,” as shorthand for a whole range of externally-focused responsibilities that take the library far beyond the scholarly record drawing I talked about earlier. I might also have used the word “leadership.”

I’ve got a bit of show and tell to do for you now, a bit of bragging, maybe, but my intention is to give you a feel for this vision in action.

My story begins this time last year, at UNC Charlotte. Our library was presented with an exceedingly generous bit of one-time money in a more or less blank check fashion. At that moment in time, a number of very prestigious University Press book publishers suddenly made their current lists available, as a package, and in digital format. No limits on simultaneous users, no digital rights restrictions, and good preservation characteristics.

We jumped, bought everything of this sort that we could. We added 75,000 monograph titles last year, average price per ebook volume: about $10.

By June, everything’s in place, the community has full access to these books.

Now, our staff looked at those titles and recognized that there were many among them that were going to be assigned reading for students in the fall. If we could get the word out to faculty and students, we could save students lots of money.

With this insight, our staff flew into action, and just in time for fall semester, produced this web page, complete with links to the ebooks. They also prepared a social media campaign to alert students and faculty. Here’s what we learned: if you use Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about free textbooks? Get out! In a PR sense, nothing we’ve ever done has been so successful, so fast.

So fall semester follows, and the use data on these new ebook packages starts to roll in. Friends, I’m here to say: the scholarly monograph is NOT dead, its use in ebook format is fantastic. Quick example: we have a huge investment in Springer journals and ebooks: our book chapter downloads, from day 1, run slightly ahead of Springer article downloads. Sure, this is a bit of apples and oranges, but on the face of it, it flies against every instinct a research librarian could ever have. Kinda mind blowing.

Spring semester comes, and this time we have had more time, we’re better prepared, and come up with this web page, and associated PR. The results have been stunning, faculty and students alike galvanizedaround our initiative, we know of a history professor teaching graduate classes for which the students have heavy reading lists, but no books they must buy.

Now class, let’s review: this anecdote gives us a shiny example of both paths: path number 1: exactly what is new about a research library buying books to support curriculum and research? And then once we’ve got them, what is new about making those books available for class use? It’s reserves! OK, there’s our ancient function, but we’ve also got path number 2: everything about howwe did all this is new, not just new, it provides brilliant new value that wasn’t possible before.

One last point about that anecdote: I ask you: did the University ask the library to invent a program like this so as to lower the cost of going to college? Because that’s exactly what’s at stake here. NO! They couldn’t have, they couldn’t have known to ask! I talked about low expectations awhile back: sometimes low expectations flow from folks just not knowing what we’re capable of. But I can promise you, people will listen, and they’ll certainly notice.

At this point our staff are fielding queries from all around the country, folks wanting the code, wanting to see how we did every aspect of this. Meanwhile, back on campus, our entire community looks at the library in a different, and better way.

Here again, a well positioned library.

I should pause here to give full credit: the vision behind this anecdote owes entirely to Chuck Hamaker. Once Chuck had this idea, he had inspired help from a large number of staff across units. Oh, and here’s another point: my role in this project? I supported it. Nothing more than that!

Seeing your library also means seeing its staff. Committed professionals every single one, they possess a spectacular range of expertise.

And yet, like the books on the shelves, these people in front of us also evoke the generations of staff that preceded them.

I’d like to tell you a story from my early days at LSU. So early that I was still scrambling to remember the names of my new colleagues. One day a meeting. We were discussing the consequences of a decision made by a staff member, and, wishing to contribute, I suggested that I could meet with her to negotiate. Which prompted whoops of laughter: this person had retired sometime in the 1960s, and had long since passed.

What an epiphany in that moment, though: such a testament to the enduring quality of our work. We can only conclude that we did not build this thing. It was handed to us as a trust, a sacred trust, that through our brains and hard work, we ensure its renewal, and then hand it over in our turn. Stronger than before.

Thanks to Andrew Praeter and Simon Barron I got a fantastic tour of the Senate House library (and building) just before I left London for home.

It’s a spectacular building–apparently, if WWII hadn’t broken out, it would have been part of a complex that extended all the way up through Gordon Square (right in front of the current Institute of Archaeology building). Crazy to think about. It was the first skyscraper in London.

It’s a landmark in Bloomsbury, and I’ve been walking past it for years, never quite realizing that’s what it was. Senate House is an interesting library in that it’s not attached to any one particular University, but rather has (someone correct me if I’m wrong) member institutions who pay for their students to have access. Senate House showed up in some of the cognitive maps that I collected from people at UCL, as a place where people enjoyed working. It’s a lovely building, I adore Art Deco architecture and design, and it’s a pleasure walking around it. The specific history of the building is fascinating, as there are elements that are simply unfinished (especially decorative flourishes that never happened), because of the War. The decorative flourishes that did manage to happen are stunning.

Stained glass windows.

The Senate Chamber. I want to give a talk in this room SO MUCH.

More stained glass.

Beautiful clock (with the reflection of Simon for good measure).

Lovely fabulous marble hall.

The library-specific spaces in Senate House are uniformly Traditional Quiet Library spaces–there are no group study spaces in Senate House (although, apparently, students will walk up to the desk and ask “where are the group study rooms?”). The assumption is that there are such spaces provided by the home academic departments. I wonder how accurate that assumption is.

At any rate, as Traditional Library Spaces go, the ones in Senate House are nicely appointed, and are a good fit with contemporary scholarly behaviors (and technology).

This traditional reading room has tables big enough for people to spread out, and also use their laptops/tablets

This reading room used to have desktop computers in it, but they moved those out and now just have large tables as shown.

Self-service laptop checkouts have replaced desktop computers distributed throughout the Senate House spaces. Patrons can take the laptops wherever in Senate House they feel most comfortable working, and don’t have to rely on where computers happen to be, if they don’t walk in with their own devices. Wireless is throughout the building.

Up in the stacks, there are workspaces as well. These little window seats have always been popular (windows are popular in Atkins, and really in nearly every library I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of where patrons like to park themselves). Senate House recently got new fittings for these window areas.

A light, a shelf, a work surface, and outlets/powerpoints. And, a chair.

There are also these tables, with powerpoints and room to spread out. The funny pillars on the end of the table are artifacts from when there was a fixed desktop and monitor on one end of the table. Senate House has moved away from desktops in their library, except where they are used for catalog check stations.

Apparently there was some initial worry that the sofas would encourage talking. I think that the arrangement of them in rows, the fact that they are massive heavy pieces, and the placement of them in a room that is clearly a “Traditional Reading Room” all sets the tone nicely, and it’s clearly a quiet place to study that just happens to be filled with soft seating rather than desks and hard chairs. I would spend all of my time here, if this were My Library.

So in addition to working in London, I had a couple of chances to do field trips to Very Special Libraries, one in Oxford, and one in Manchester. The one in Oxford I’ve known about for a while:

The Bodleain

Oxford is lovely, old, and filled with high walls, locked gates, and closed doors. It is a secret society, I will never know the handshake.
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) March 22, 2014

One of the many beautiful closed doors in Oxford

I know, I know, Oxford is not a “public” university, there should be different notions of access, I cannot expect the walls and gates and doors of Oxford to be open to all comers, because it’s just never been that way.

You have to climb up pretty high to see into the enclosures of Oxford.

But the collective experience of the closed-off feel, the tour wherein we were assured that the most important people in the building were The Scholars (and therefore, Not Us), and signs like this:

No Smoking I can get behind. SILENCE PLEASE is different.

really hammer it home–“This is not for you.”

The Rylands Library, on the other hand, is a Special Collections library associated with the University of Manchester (a red-brick state school).

You can walk right in, no charge, even if you are not a student (which is not necessarily the case at UCL, even, where you have to swipe your bar-coded-card to enter every library, and most of the academic buildings). The Rylands is a Gothic Cathedral to knowledge (I’ve blogged about libraries that make me think of ecclesiastical monuments before), and the reading room is open to anyone who wants to work in there, even if they are not working with the Rylands collections. It’s a beautiful building, and a rare example of an inspiring space that is also accessible.

We talked briefly in our Spaces, Places and Practices seminar about the impact of spaces, in particular Traditional Library spaces that invoke places like the Bodleian and Rylands. But Traditional Library spaces, while they can be used by students and faculty to get themselves into a desired state of mind (for reading, for writing, for scholarship of various kinds), can also feel exclusionary. It’s as if some students internalize the signs that the Bodleian puts up (and sells in their gift shop!), and transfer that to all library spaces. It’s not enough to be respectful of the space, you have to act so that they cannot tell you are there. SILENCE. I understand the utility of focus and quiet. I understand less the signals that emphasize the otherworldly nature of scholarship to the point of alienating people from the traditional places of scholarship. I am not convinced they are necessary.

They also make me want to stomp my boots and dance around in the courtyard of the Bodleian.

Huddersfield Train Station, with Taxman Mister Wilson in the foreground

So at this point I’ve given 2 different versions of this talk, once at UNC Greensboro, in the library, and just recently at the University of Huddersfield, also in the library. I talk from a combination of notes, script, and the Prezi, so this is an approximation, but I’d like to share it because it’s a relatively coherent statement of what I think is possible via qualitative work like mine, and where I think academic libraries can create opportunities for their voice to be heard within higher education generally. Special thanks to Erin Lawrimore for inviting me to UNCG, and to Bryony Ramsden and Kathrine Jensen for getting me to Huds.

In-depth qualitative data collection for policy decisions

I don’t get much chance to speak about the nature of my work in a systematic way, and this is giving me a chance to put together thoughts that I’ve been accumulating over the past year or so about the nature of the information that informs library policy. It has been changing over time, and the attention paid to things like qualitative research marks a real shift in administrative focus, and has implications for assessment, as well.

I’m speaking to you today (as I speak every day) as an anthropologist, and so an outsider to library science (but not to higher education, as I am an academic through and through). But I am also someone employed by an academic library. I was hired as library ethnographer in 2009, with arrival of a university librarian who had been at Rochester, where Nancy Fried Foster was at the time. Her hire inspired by the participatory design policy of places like Xerox, who hire social scientists, including anthropologists, to do research into user behavior, to inform their products.

Nancy’s work has certainly made participatory design a highly visible part of what qualitative research agendas can do in higher education, but I’ve been asked to take on an ethnography of academic work generally, to find projects (small and large) that illuminate the behavior of students and faculty on our campus, not just within the library.

The use of words like “disruptive” and “provocative” within library policy discussions (and higher ed generally) has become cliche, but I find them useful in trying to frame the role for anthropologists (and even other social scientists) in academic libraries. Positions like mine are a provocation, not just to library-land, but to Higher Ed. generally.

The researcher from Intel pointed strongly to the potential for innovation that comes out of persistent and embedded anthropological attention to technology and the processes involved in producing that technology. She worked with engineers, who were so immersed in the production of technology that they lost sight of the people who would be using it.

Likewise, anthropological attention to uses of technology in information seeking can help us think more carefully about how we use technology to engage with people in academia, students and faculty alike.

I know there are people with anthropology and sociology training working as librarians now, but the qualitative work is seldom their full time job (so many people run up to me at library conferences and confess their undergraduate degrees in anthropology!). Myself and Andrew Asher (At Bloomington) are the only two I am aware of who are employed full time by universities in the US, and I know of one anthropologist who was just hired by the London School of Economics in the UK.

The idea is not to thumb our noses at current practice, but to actually provide a place for the new to emerge. Margaret Mead talked about anthropology as making the “exotic familiar, and the familiar exotic.” She is talking about the power of cross-cultural insights allowing fresh eyes on our own society, the practices of others helping us think critically about our own practices.

We are fundamentally searching for insights into why. Anthropology assumes that there is a logic to people’s behavior. It’s not enough to describe or count the things people do or interact with or own or use. And furthermore, there are things that we can observe are important that we cannot count–or there are things we should be counting that we don’t know are important. We need multiple ways of talking about what is happening–a holistic approach can include counting, but needs to incorporate other ways of observing/describing. Ethnographic practices can provide such a thing. And I would argue that they are most effectively deployed as a part of a full-time qualitative agenda, not just carved out of already existing jobs, or brought in short-term.

Qualitative methods need explanations and defense in part because they are not the norm in library-land, and are still contested outside of qualitative-centric fields like anthropology and sociology. My experience working with LIS has reflected this–I have participated in longitudinal qualitative studies that my LIS colleagues are still still very very nervous about if it’s not embedded in a survey that we also conduct. I see this concern about generalizability, etc. reflecting a general unease with actionability of qualitative data.

BUT:

Higher Ed is quantitative in part because of a policy orientation where evaluation is the equivalent to counting and measuring (think: grades). Assessment, however, should be about information that can lead to changes, and ideally, improvements. A reasonable question to ask is to what extent the massive amounts of quantitative data libraries collect every year has led to improvements

For example, UNC Charlotte Atkins Library recently participated in the MISO survey; we now have all of these numbers, what do they mean? For example, these “satisfaction” graphs from various constituencies:

All the bars are basically the same length. What can this mean? What does it mean when we ask about “satisfaction with the library?” How can that be quantified? Why would we want to quantify that?

It’s just not enough.

Qualitative data can move library improvements in a way that traditional treatment of quantitative data has not. This is the power of insights, of epiphany, of something beyond just description. Evaluation and analytics are descriptive, and not necessarily with an eye to change. Assessment should be about that which can drive change.We cannot get rid of quantitative data, nor should we want to, but I believe it needs to be embedded in the context provided by qualitative researchers. Approaches to our quantitative data can be transformed with considered uses of qualitative research in libraries, and higher education generally.

Think of individual projects that characterize themselves as “mixed-method.” Imagine a “mixed-method.” library, drawing on both sorts of information.

What does that look like?

It can look like me: the Anthropologist in the Stacks. The permanent staff presence of a qualitative researcher means non-LIS people working within the library. Disciplinary knowledge from outside of LIS can illuminate higher education policies, not just within library, but across the university. So, I am not just talking about a mixed-methods library, but an interdisciplinary one.

(I have blogged already about examples from the Atkins library –here is the point in the talk where I use Prezi to give visual examples of the kinds of data I’ve been collecting, including Photo Diaries, observations, and cognitive mapping. If you peruse the stuff tagged #anthrolib you can get a feel for it, if you haven’t already.)

We need to know what people are doing to effectively engage. Anthropology, ethnographic techniques, qualitative research can help us learn this. There are additional implications for the position of academic libraries within their institutions, once they commit to a qualitative research agenda.

For example, at UNC Charlotte, the library is represented on a campus-wide meeting about Student Success. We are positioned as colleagues within the university, rather than as “helpers”–we are part of a scholarly community, and we also provide, in the library, a neutral ground for the coming together of scholars (including ourselves).

There is tremendous potential for libraries in higher education to be sources of qualitative research about student and faculty work/behaviors. This research can give us a voice on campus around issues that people in Higher Education are interested in: what students do, where they go, what faculty do, why.

Anthropologists and other social scientists can produce data which may be brought to bear on policy decisions at the college and university, and which has the potential to positively impact student academic success. The fact that these studies come out of the Library has implications for the role academic libraries can play in higher education generally, potentially transforming the kind of voice libraries have in university policy, because we are producing information/data that no other sector of higher education is doing. This is powerful. We need to do it more.

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Both times I gave this talk, I just sort of stopped there, and asked for questions, and was really gratified by the engagement and thought that was put into the discussion. I wish I had transcripts to share of what we talked about at UNCG, and also at Huddersfield. Dave Pattern and Bryony Ramsden were kind enough to tweet some of the content of my talk, I Storifyed it here: